dpiponi

dpiponi, 17 hours ago to random

One of my favorite visual effects from pre-CG days was the shield effect in 1984's Dune. Lots of work with an optical printer. Underrated, I think, as I've never heard anyone talk about it.

https://youtu.be/6XFYV2h5gAo?si=eVz-fVrtMJ8wBME0&t=24

glennf, 21 hours ago to random

Saw a clip of the Agatha series actors bragging that the show has very little CG. The magic was all…practical. Who cares? What is this obsession? CG is only an issue for the director and creative people on the movie and accountants, and if it distracts by looking unreal while watching a TV show or movie. An unhealthy focus that feels anti-VFX worker, when there’s so much VFX in media that nobody realizes. This series captures the issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ttG90raCNo&t=937s

dpiponi, 1 day ago to random

It's not like I had any chance of resisting when one of my favourite books is published in a fancy new hardback edition

dpiponi, 2 days ago to random

Looked up speed of snails on Google to see if my USPS package "moving through network" from San Francisco is literally going at a snail's pace. Looks like snails would have to be 3 times faster to beat my package.

dpiponi, 4 days ago to random

When I first came across Voigtländer's paper on speeding up free monads [1] and some of the methods that Hinze mentions [2] I was a bit bemused about why category theory had anything to say about program optimization. But now it seems obvious. Much of optimization is a lot like algebraic manipulation where you're rearranging while hoping to keep the value the same. But in particular, a really common optimization move is to write f(g(x)) as (fg)(x) where (fg) is somehow simpler (or more reusable than) than just applying g then f. Ie. associativity - which is one of the laws of category theory. I think this step also accounts for almost all of the computational reasons for using linear algebra. Eg. graphics pipelines make good use of this kind of associativity.

[1] https://janis-voigtlaender.eu/papers/AsymptoticImprovementOfComputationsOverFreeMonads.pdf
[2] https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/ralf.hinze/Kan.pdf

pervognsen, 5 days ago to random

There's a retired couple living in my mom's apartment complex who seems to spend 12 hours every day sunbathing outside during the summer months. They did this when we were visiting last year and they're continuing the streak apparently. After you've lived in a warm climate for a while, the whole idea of sunbathing starts to seem obscene, but this is something else.

dpiponi, 7 days ago to random

I know I must be a uniquely weird individual because in decades of using tabbed web browsers I've still never wanted to close tabs to the right and I've often wanted to close tabs to the left.

dpiponi, 7 days ago to random

Watched The Descent for the second time. Just as good as the first time. To me it's the perfect little horror movie.

dpiponi, 8 days ago to random

For me, and presumably countless others, a computer has always been primarily a creativity tool. But I think this idea may be novel or unusual to a large segment of the population.

dpiponi, 9 days ago to random

One of the weirder bugs I've experienced: you know how you're always being told to make sure caps lock is off when you enter your password? My Mac is currently enabling caps-lock at login and you can't disable it. It took a long time to deduce this was the problem but surprisingly I was able to log in after going round a few loops and realising an obvious trick...

A known problem with a venerable history: https://iboysoft.com/tips/macbook-stuck-on-caps-lock.html

dpiponi, 10 days ago to random

I love the waves of leg motion on this critter that was walking across our driveway.

Very dark red segmented worm like creature with maybe 100 legs that move in waves starting at the back and moving forward.

dpiponi, 10 days ago to random

I hate typing practice. Seriously. I've been programming computers since before most of you were born. But I need to move on from being a two fingered typist, even if a fast one,

dpiponi, 10 days ago to random

I have to admit I enjoy seeing familiar sci-fi plots appearing as papers. This one proposes that AIs cause civilizational collapse, explaining the Fermi "paradox".

https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00042

"AI could represent a major threat to the future course of not only our technical civilisation but all technical civilisations"

dpiponi, 12 days ago to random

Let me tell you about my embarrassingly stupid C++ mistake so you don't have to make it:

If X is of type std::optional<T> and Y is of type T you can assign Y to X like so:

X = Y

I sort of don't like that because X and Y are different types.

You can also write

*X = Y

which works because *X is of type T&. Now the types match.

But woe is me! Don't do the latter. If X is an empty optional then *X = Y fails silently.

It's obvious when you think about it for a moment. But when you're thinking about the bigger picture you can forget about the little things.

dpiponi, 13 days ago to random

I kept saying to myself "he's gotta be an alien", "surely he's not human", but in my heart of hearts I didn't really believe it...until...well I'm not giving you any spoilers...